How do you feel about the US "owning" the Net?

The move to keep control of the Web stateside has, unsurprisingly, garnered bipartisan support among many Americans, who contend that much of the infrastructure in place today was developed and maintained by American entities. Some other nations, though, don't trust the U.S. to look out for their needs and priorities. Is the U.S. government the best fit to manage the Internet's infrastructure and regulations in the future? Or is the U.S. being unreasonable in its refusal to relinquish control to someone else?

3 Comments

The concept of someone owning a federated network is flawed, we maintain control via a contract between the DOC and ICANN but we dont own &quot;the net&quot;.

I might remind you that the concept of the net and the technical implementations making it possible was our invention and our approach to point has had a number of positive effects (not saying lack of control would have caused negative ones).

The biggest thing that Americans fear is taxation; international bodies with stateless interests have long looked for methods of funding outside of the donations of wealthy nations; exercising control over such a vast and important global resource would afford the leverage such a body would need to impose levys as they see fit.

Also, and this is the less altruistic yet certainly strategic motive, if we lack control we give up a significant strategic opportunity in the fastest growing field of warfare; after all the technology of the net was born of a US defense project...

I'm not convinced the UN needs to be involved with the internet admin at all. The one thing I am certain of is that the internal is a global thing now. No one country can be allowed to run it in the future. The more we grasp at keeping the internet 'ours', the sooner it will be that we will have the US internet, and the world internet. That's a bad thing. The internet as itself has a very great skill: routing around &quot;problems&quot;. Sometimes those problems are political opression; sometimes there are stupid laws; sometimes they're outages, and sometimes they are simply inter-BigCo disputes.

The internet routes around those issues, and finds a way to get there from here. That's what it does, and it does it well. Is the US keeps fighting this, the internet will perceive us as the problem, and route around us; eventuall cutting us our of a larger picture IMHO.